Remarque and Hemingway
I also find Remarque's understated approach to the war very powerful, and it's a testimony to his talent, at least in this novel, that he produces the effect in the reader that he's after--not blasting us with overwrought prose but relying on the "facts" of war to stop us in our tracks.
Was Hemingway's style affected by the war? It had to have been. He did his serious writing after the war, and Fussell in The Great War and Modern Memory says that art was one of the things changed forever in the West by WWI. The quote from A Farewell to Arms that I mentioned in my Sunday article is among the most famous coming out of the war: "Abstract words such as glory, honor, courage or hallow were obscene beside the concrete names of villages, the numbers of roads, the names of rivers, the numbers of regiments and the dates."
Chuck's point late yesterday about micro and macro views of the war is relevant here. Still in chapter 1, Paul says, "We loved our country as much as they; we went courageously into every action; but also we distinguished the false from true, we had suddenly learned to see." This is the unblinkered "wisdom" of war. But did the trench soldier think in terms of "nobility, bravery, devotion, and honor" (Chuck's words)?
Kemmerich's boots again come into play: Muller at the same time wants the boots and is "sympathetic" to Kemmerich. Pushing ahead to chapter 2, Paul comments that "We have lost all sense of other considerations, because they are artificial."
Later in ch. 2, talking about their training before going to the front, Paul states clearly what the war yielded for them: "But by far the most important result was that it awakened in us a strong, practical sense of esprit de corps, which in the field developed into the finest thing that arose out of the war--comradeship." That is truly a "micro view": in the trenches they don't know the big picture, but they know what's important and true. Is this sort of comradeship possible only in war?
Comments
First on the Hemmingway style: its spare unadorned structure of subject-verb-object reflects the modernist movement that came into vogue after the War. So in one sense it captured the Zeitgeist. Remarque does the same thing: "I collect the things, untie Kemmerich's identification disc and take it away. The orderly asks about the paybook. I say that it probably is in the Orderly Room and go." You could stick that into A Farewell to Arms without missing beat.
I think it also captured the mental state of the characters. The Hemmingway Hero, say Jake Barnes in the Sun Also Rises, has undergone some type of transformation that seems to have bleached out the world for him. Adjectives and adverbs are foreign to his thoughts, perhaps because too much of the War requires unpleasant adjectives to describe it. The Hemmingway Hero tries to avoid these types of thoughts.
"[I]n the trenches they don't know the big picture, but they know what's important and true. Is this sort of comradeship possible only in war?" War and team sports.
And the corollary was discussed below: those who aren't in the trenches or the huddle can't be part of or even understand that comradeship.
Posted by: Chuck Snakard | June 19, 2007 10:34 AM